Jonathan R. Zatlin

Selling modernity : advertising in twentieth-century Germany

The sheer intensity and violence of Germany’s twentieth century—through the end of an empire, two world wars, two democracies, and two dictatorships—provide a unique opportunity to assess the power and endurance of commercial imagery in the most extreme circumstances. Selling Modernity places advertising and advertisements in this tumultuous historical setting, exploring such themes as the relationship between advertising and propaganda in Nazi Germany, the influence of the United States on German advertising, the use of advertising to promote mass consumption in West Germany, and the ideological uses and eventual prohibition of advertising in East Germany. While the essays are informed by the burgeoning literature on consumer society, Selling Modernity focuses on the actors who had the greatest stake in successful merchandising: company managers, advertising executives, copywriters, graphic artists, market researchers, and salespeople, all of whom helped shape the depiction of a company’s products, reputation, and visions of modern life. The contributors consider topics ranging from critiques of capitalism triggered by the growth of advertising in the 1890s to the racial politics of Coca-Cola’s marketing strategies during the Nazi era, and from the post-1945 career of an erotica entrepreneur to a federal anti-drug campaign in West Germany. Whether analyzing the growing fascination with racialized discourse reflected in early-twentieth-century professional advertising journals or the postwar efforts of Lufthansa to lure holiday and business travelers back to a country associated with mass murder, the contributors reveal advertising’s central role in debates about German culture, business, politics, and society. Contributors . Shelley Baranowski, Greg Castillo, Victoria de Grazia, Guillaume de Syon, Holm Friebe, Rainer Gries, Elizabeth Heineman, Michael Imort, Anne Kaminsky, Kevin Repp , Corey Ross, Jeff Schutts, Robert P. Stephens, Pamela E. Swett, S. Jonathan Wiesen, Jonathan R. Zatlin

Rethinking Reunification: German Monetary Union and European Integration

On February 6, 1990, West German chancellor Helmut Kohl surprised his closest advisers, the West German public, his East German friends and foes, as well as his Western European partners and Soviet interlocutors by offering to extend the deutsche mark (DM) eastward to the German Democratic Republic (GDR).1 The chancellor had only arrived at his decision that morning, too late for the discussion point to appear on the agenda of the cabinet meeting set for the next day.2 Although they nevertheless approved his plan, Kohl’s ministers were caught unprepared by a decision they had gone on record as opposing.3 Just a few weeks prior to Kohl’s decision, for example, West German finance minister Theo Waigel had dismissed rapid monetary union with the GDR as “hair-raising,” while Bundesbank president Karl Otto Pohl had ruled it out as “fantastic and unrealistic.”4 In fact, the very day of Kohl’s announcement, Pohl told journalists that introducing the DM into the GDR was “premature,” whereas Economic Minister Helmut Haussmann presented a plan that foresaw monetary union by January 1, 1993, at the earliest.5

Unifying without Integrating: The East German Collapse and German Unity

The demise of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) came as a sur prise to most western observers. For historians of modern Europe, its disappearance remains remarkable for at least two reasons. First, East Germany has ceased to exist in an era when new states are constantly being born. Since the French Revolution unleashed the power of national self-deter mination as an ordering principle more than 200 years ago, new sovereign states have continued to emerge across the globe, whether through the breakup of multiethnic and colonial empires or the dissolution of pan-Slavic states in eastern Europe. Illiberal governments have been swept aside, often with the result that new states have been cast out of imperial entities by the centrifugal force of cultural attachment. In the history of European political sovereignty during the twentieth century, the particular has triumphed over the universal. Except in the case of the GDR. Against the tide of European history, the GDR has gone from sovereign state (East Germany) to regional designation (eastern Germany). In this sense, the story of the GDR s absorption by a larger polity is a tale of modern state-building told in reverse. Similarly, the collapse of communist authority that preceded the GDRs dis solution is the story, told backward, of the correlation between economic rationality and political power in modern Europe. Nowhere has the mutually reinforcing, if always potentially repressive, relationship between economic development and bureaucratic control been illustrated in a more striking manner than in the life and death of the GDR. In his masterpiece of modernism,

Out of Sight: Industrial Espionage, Ocular Authority and East German Communism, 1965–1989

The Stasi continues to enjoy a reputation as one of the most effective espionage agencies in the world, especially in the area of foreign intelligence gathering. This article employs the case of Gerhardt Ronneberger, one of East Germanys most capable spies, to challenge assumptions about the Stasis operational successes, economic relevance and methodological proficiency. In particular, it argues that East German intelligence gathering was undermined by an institutionalisd distinction between sight, or the work of observation, and vision, or the process of signification. In Ronnebergers case, the spy agency wasted considerable time and resources trying to make sense of his operational performance and political reliability. In the end, however, even his most spectacular successes, which included smuggling a laser-guided navigation system into the GDR and acquiring proscribed computer chip and microprocessor designs from Toshiba, did not matter, since they did not change East Germanys inability to narrow the technological gap with the West.

Gerald D. Feldman (1937–2007)

W V THETHER it was his prodigious publication rate or the untiring help he extended to his students, the remarkable generosity he showed to colleagues or the anger he occasionally displayed over what he con sidered to be problematic scholarship, or merely his outsized appetite for good food, Gerry Feldman was a titanic force in the field of German history for more than forty years. His fascination with the past, love of the present, and concern for the future transformed his spacious home in the Oakland hills and his cramped office at the University of California at Berkeley into international des tinations for itinerant intellectuals. His writing and his personal relations were infused with an exuberant delight in the most mundane of things and a wry appreciation of lifes greatest challenges. With his passing, we have lost a great advocate of transnational scholarly relations, one of the professions most talented economic historians, and our foremost expert on the Weimar Republic, its antecedents, and the men who dug its grave. Feldman grew up in modest circumstances in a Jewish household in New York City. He acquired a love of opera at a young age by listening to radio broadcasts while visiting with his father in his workshop. A state scholarship helped to pay for his undergraduate education at Columbia Univer sity, where he published his first scholarly paper as a senior in 1958 on the Treaty of Versailles. From Columbia he went to Harvard University, where he studied with Franklin Ford and William L. Langer. His dissertation, which was pub lished in 1966 as Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany, 1914-1918, remains a classic commentary on Wilhelmine collapse and Weimar weakness. The book was immediately recognized for its thorough documentation of the Armys attempt to mobilize the civilian economy for military purposes, its rich portrait of a vacillating and incompetent military leadership, its innovative emphasis on interest group politics, and its skillful location of Weimars origins in Erich von Ludendorffs military dictatorship. Especially influential has been Feldmans argument that the Armys logistical needs led it to broker a truce between capital and labor, which dealt a fatal blow to the alliance